Here at Pitcher List, we have a suite of PLV metrics to study every event in a baseball game at the pitch level. Decision Value (DV) is our hitter swing decision metric. It takes inputs like pitch velocity, location, and movement, and tells us whether the hitter made a good decision to swing or take a particular pitch. This isn’t quite as simple as plate discipline; swinging at a Logan Webb sinker and pounding it into the ground is a bad outcome even if the pitch was a strike.
Instead, Decision Value rewards hitters for swinging at pitches they should be able to hit hard, and for taking pitches they’re unlikely to do much with. The flipside is that Decision Value punishes hitters if they don’t swing at pitches they should be doing damage on or do swing at pitches that are unlikely to generate quality contact. You can find a much more thorough introduction to PLV metrics and Decision Value here.
Contact ability and making good swing decisions have a more complicated relationship than you might expect. It’s reasonable to think that players who excel at contact do so because they restrict their swings to the best pitches to attack, like Steven Kwan. On the other hand, a batter who knows they can get the bat on everything may want to exercise that skill by being less selective at the plate, like ex-teammates Bo Bichette and Ernie Clement. Similarly, batters who struggle to make contact might choose to increase how frequently they swing to give themselves more opportunities, a la Javier Báez or Ezequiel Tovar. Conversely, contact-challenged batters might also want to pick their spots and only attack the pitches they’re relatively confident in hitting, like Munetaka Murakami or Garrett Mitchell.
Before turning to any particular player in detail, I calculated the correlations between the PLV Decision Value and Contact metrics. The data covers the 317 hitters who have faced at least 300 pitches through May 19th.
Overall, the correlations between decision value and contact are fairly weak. Perhaps that’s to be expected, given that there are easy-to-find examples of hitters who satisfy every combination of contact skills and swing decisions. While it’s not the focus of this piece, Decision Value and oDV are incredibly highly correlated, while DV and zDV are only weakly related. These correlations are telling us that nearly everyone who makes good swing decisions in general is good at not chasing. There are people who make poor swing decisions overall, though, and are still relatively good decision-makers inside the zone. This is a result of swinging at strikes being, on average, a good thing to do, even if some strikes are better to swing at than others. Thus, the most aggressive hitters in the game, like Trevor Story or Clement, can have solid or even great zDVs despite relatively poor overall swing decisions. DV and oDV are both negatively correlated with the PLV Contact measure, with correlation coefficients of -0.15 and -0.17, respectively. Contact is positively correlated, on the other hand, with zDV, although still weakly, with a 0.07 correlation coefficient. As a result, there’s generally nothing we can conclude in the aggregate about the relationship between good swing decisions and contact ability. Instead, let’s put some specific players under the swing decision microscope, with this week’s focus being on the elite contact bats in MLB.
Nico Hoerner: 140 Contact, 100 DV, 105 zDV, 98 oDV
Hoerner ranks atop the PLV Contact metric leaderboard after finishing second in 2025 and ninth in 2024. Despite his excellent contact ability, Hoerner is off to a slow start in the batting average category, hitting .264/.348/.391. Interestingly, his on-base percentage and slugging percentage are both in line with his career norms. His OBP is being supported by a career-high 10.1% walk rate, with his previous full-season peak being a 7.1% walk rate in 2023. Hoerner is also running his highest ISO since 2022, although at .127, it’s not too much to write home about.
While Hoerner’s overall swing decisions are the best of his career, it’s unlikely that those decisions are what’s causing the surge in walks. Hoerner has consistently maintained oDVs in the 90s for the past two seasons, so this isn’t a radical change. Indeed, he’s chasing 31% of the time this year, which is just a slight improvement on his 32.3% and 31.8% chase rates of the past two years. Instead, Hoerner appears to be the beneficiary of the ABS strike zone shrinking. Pitchers are throwing balls about 3.3% more often this year, and the league-wide walk rate has increased by about 1 percentage point. While those numbers sound small, a 1 percentage point increase in the league walk rate is nearly 12% more walks. Hoerner has also been a beneficiary of pitchers throwing him more obvious balls. The share of pitches Hoerner sees in the heart of the zone is down 3.6 percentage points since last year. The share of waste pitches he’s seeing is up an almost-identical 3.4 percentage points.
While his walks have benefited, Hoerner has a .264 batting average that is well below his expectations. Despite his above-average swing decisions in the zone and improvements in his overall DV and oDV, Hoerner’s zDV has dropped below his previously established level. In 2024, Hoerner posted a 111 zDV. In 2025, he improved by a point to 112. The drop this year is coming from a reduction in his aggression inside the zone. Hoerner has cut his zone swing rate from 63.2% in 2025 to 54.4% thus far in 2026. The drop isn’t coming from ultra-selectivity around the outside of the zone, either. Hoerner has reduced his swing rate on pitches in the heart of the zone by nearly 10 percentage points, while only trimming about 3 percentage points of swing in the shadow of the zone.
Ultimately, what’s probably going on for Hoerner is poor batted-ball luck. He’s running a .268 BABIP, 37 points below his career average. He’s hitting the ball a little less hard thus far in 2026, but hitting the ball hard has never been part of his game. Statcast agrees, with his expected average still sitting at a robust .291. I’d be confident in Hoerner’s batting average coming back up to elite levels over the remainder of the season. The extra walks are a nice bonus as well, providing him with more opportunities to steal bags and score runs.
Steven Kwan: 136 Contact, 114 DV, 94 zDV, 115 oDV
It’s been a rough season so far for Kwan and his fantasy managers. Kwan has struggled to a .202/.330/.260 line through the first third of the season, with the lone bright spot being a huge spike in his walk rate from 7.9% to 15.1%. This season, Kwan’s strikeout rate has also increased to a career-high 11.1% rate. The main issue for Kwan at this point is his BABIP. Kwan is only reaching on about 23% of balls in play, with his .231 BABIP sitting 65 points below his career rate.
Unlike the other contact specialists here, Kwan has always maintained a strong ability to lay off pitches outside the zone. Kwan is one standard deviation better than average in his oDV this year. He posted an above-average 105 oDV in 2025, a 113 oDV in 2024, and a 110 oDV in 2023. This has led him to a consistently solid walk rate of 9.8% over his first three seasons in the majors before he dipped to 7.9% last year. It’s Kwan’s zDV that is currently a career low, after posting a 107 zDV in 2025, 99 in 2024, and 105 in 2023. While Kwan’s 94 zDV isn’t a huge dip, he has changed his approach significantly this year. Through the first third of 2026, Kwan is only swinging at 49% of strikes. His career rate entering this season was 57.4%. In this case, I’d interpret the small change in zDV after a big change in swing rate to mean that Kwan has pared off the worst of the pitches he was swinging at and kept the best. It was still a good idea for him to swing at those pitches he’s now watching for strikes, but he’s managed to mitigate the passivity by choosing well when to swing the bat.
In Kwan’s case, there’s a clear change in approach driving some of his poor results. If he continues letting more than half of the strikes he sees go, I’d expect his strikeout rate to remain higher than we’d normally expect for him. He’s still making contact at an excellent rate when he does swing, but his swing has gotten slower and longer this season, leading to first percentile exit velos and barrel rate. I don’t think this approach is doing him any favors, and I’d even go so far as to say this version of Steven Kwan is unlikely to be a batting average asset at all. While he might maintain the OBP gains from his higher walk rate, he’s also not running much with only three stolen base attempts. I think he belongs on the waiver wire in even 15-team leagues until you see the approach become meaningfully more aggressive.
Ernie Clement: 134 Contact, 69 DV, 121 zDV, 62 oDV
I love Ernie Clement. As a fantasy player, he entered the season with eligibility at second, third, and short, and, depending on your league’s eligibility rules, potentially also first base. He’s not going to wow you with power or speed, but he’s not an absolute zero in those categories either. His fantasy carrying tool is his batting average. With standard NFBC league settings, his 2025 season was worth $9.5 according to the Fangraphs auction calculator. This year he’s been off to an even better start, hitting .296/.320/.429.
Clement is a fairly recent addition to the ranks of the elite contact hitters in MLB. He debuted with the Guardians in 2021, but had just 364 plate appearances in the first three seasons of his career. Over the past two years, however, Clement has had a near-everyday role with the Blue Jays, featuring as their super-utility player. Despite mostly locking down second base this season, Clement has already made 9 appearances at shortstop and 7 at third base, likely ensuring his continued multi-position eligibility into the future.
Clement is the elite contact hitter who is making the worst swing decisions this season, according to DV, except for Ildemaro Vargas. Unlike Vargas, who has an 88 zDV and 70 oDV, Clement is elite at selecting what to swing at in the zone. He’s just swinging at way too much outside the zone, too. Clement has chased this year at a career-high 45.5% rate, while swinging in the zone 69.3% of the time, roughly his career rate. Vargas, for context, chases a bit less than Clement at 42.8% of balls, but he only swings at 58.8% of strikes.
Clement has achieved his success by maximizing the potential of his second-percentile bat speed. Despite the slow bat speed, Clement goes after the ball and pulls it in the air like his name’s Alex Bregman. His bat tracking metrics are, if anything, even more aggressive than Bregman’s archetypal lift-and-pull approach. Clement makes contact 10 inches in front of home plate, tied for 12th in MLB, and is nestled among power hitters like Max Muncy and Jake Burger. This season, Clement has pulled 20.1% of his batted balls in the air, a slight decline from the 22% rates he posted for the past two seasons. Clement also makes consistently solid contact, posting a 94th percentile squared-up rate. Clement’s aggression at the plate has been beneficial for him in generating high averages and more power than his swing would suggest, but it also comes with a cost. His very high chase rate, in the first percentile of MLB, denies him the extra times on base that would make him a more solid contributor in the runs category, and makes last season’s 83 runs look like a peak.
Luis Arraez: 138 Contact, 102 DV, 132 zDV, 91 oDV
Arraez has had a resurgent 2026 season, posting a 120 wRC+ through the first third of the season after putting up a 109 wRC+ in 2024 and 104 wRC+ in 2025. Part of his success is being driven by a rebound on his BABIP. He’s reaching at a .318 clip on balls in play, still 10 points shy of his career mark, but a 30 point jump on 2025. Arraez is doing so while maintaining a 3.4% K-rate, the second-lowest of his career, and a 6.4% walk rate, his highest mark since 2022.
Arraez has always maintained historic contact rates, but his approach at the plate has shown some significant year-to-year shifts. In his time with the Twins, Arraez swung infrequently, just 42.9% of the time. Since leaving Minnesota, Arraez has been swinging 49.8% of the time, including a 50.6% rate so far this season. Not all swings are created equal, however, and Arraez had shown some signs of decline in his swing decision-making. After posting 106 DVs in 2021 and 2022, Arraez had a 96 DV in 2023, followed by an 87 in 2024 and an 88 in 2025. The changes are clear when looking at his swing rates. Once he left the Twins in 2023, Arraez started swinging more often at both balls and strikes. His 7 percentage point spike in swing rate came equally from pitches in and outside the zone. In the last two seasons, however, Arraez gave back his increases in zone swing percentage while putting up the two highest chase rates of his career.
This season, Arraez is showing an approach closer to his 2023 swing decisions. He’s trimmed about two percentage points of chase, leaving him just a bit above his 2023 rate. He’s increased his zone swing rate to a full two-thirds of pitches he’s seen inside the zone, about two percentage points less than his career-high rate in 2023. In particular, he’s swinging at the right two-thirds of strikes. His 132 zDV is two standard deviations above the MLB average, and 11 points higher than his 2023 mark. Between his zero barrels on the season and his cavernous home park, Arraez seems unlikely to ever reach double-digit homers again as he did in 2023. Nevertheless, the combination of his ever-present contact ability and newly enhanced swing decisions suggests we could get something closer to his 2022 line of .316/.375/.420.
Nico Hoerner Photo by Larry Radloff/Icon Sportswire | Luis Arraez Photo by Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire | Designed by Aaron Asbury (@aarongifs on Instagram)
